When that high-profile project just ain't gonna happen, how can you ensure that your head isn't on the chopping block? Matt Heusser provides some practical suggestions for passing on the bad news without just passing the blame.

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The company, department, or customer bets the farm that project X will be
done by late October in order to make the Christmas sales period. Various
managers assure them that this can be done. Around June, the big boss calls you
into his office and explains to your team the importance of the project, its
crucial nature to the business, the value of your contribution, and the
importance of the deadline.

Time passes...

Sometime around July 15, you realize that there’s no way you can
meet the deadline. It doesn’t matter how much overtime you work, it
doesn’t matter how lucky you get—it just won’t
happen.

Welcome to the doom train. All aboard.

If you’ve been a technical contributor for long, this scenario is
probably rather familiar. In fact, you may be living it right now. If
that’s the case, take heart—we’ve all been there before. This
article is written just for you.

It’s important to note that being doomed has nothing to do with
performance; it’s all about expectations. Whether having project X done by
October 15 is reasonable does not really matter if project X is
expected on that date. In my own career, literally every single time I have been
doomed has been due to this expectation gap; nothing else comes close.

Before I offer advice, we need to make sure that you really are doomed. The
expanse of human potential is incredible; don’t count yourself out just
because things look grim today. If you just had a bad day, you are just stuck on
a particularly nasty problem, or the project is challenging but
possible, throwing in the towel early and following the advice in this
article can make your life much worse.

There are lots of ways to figure out whether you’re doomed. One simple
approach is a burn-down chart. Break the project into tasks and assign a point
value to each task, such as how many hours the task should take. Figure out how
many points your team is accomplishing per week, and you can project out to when
the project will finish. If projected completion is past the due date,
you’re doomed. If the project is visibly off-track, you can try to
brainstorm a half-dozen actions within your power to bring it back on track.
Have you given up bull sessions and web-surfing, put in reasonable overtime,
tried to offload non-project work, and every other reasonable step?

Yup, still doomed.

Like any recovery program, we’ve completed the first
step—recognizing the problem. Recognizing your doomed-ness is liberating,
because you can stop wishing and hoping and "trying harder," and
instead take actual steps to improve your life. Despite the dark cloud hanging
over you and coloring your vision of the world, it’s possible to improve
the situation, given just a few techniques and a plan. Let’s talk about
some specific techniques first.

"I Can’t Do This": The Power of Congruence

The typical response to doomed-ness is fight-or-flight: getting scared and
working lots of overtime, or getting defensive and finger-pointing. Neither of
those options deals with the real problem—the combination of expectation
and ability.

If you were picked to work on the big critical piece of the product, odds are
that it’s because you are good at what you do and well suited to do it.
Perhaps no one else knows the technology or codebase as well as you, or you may
have certain natural talents.

If you are coming from such a position of respect, you can arrange a private
meeting with the boss and tell him very respectfully, "I can’t finish
project X by October 15. I want to. I’m working hard at it and I want us
to succeed. Perhaps you can find someone else to do it, but I
can’t."

Of course, there is no one else. A savvy boss will realize this fact
very quickly. If you can’t do it, nobody can. At this moment, you are no
longer doomed—you have transitioned the doomed-ness to the boss. This will
completely upset his sense of control, and trigger his fight-or-flight response.
To smooth things over, you’ll want the next step, covered in the following
section.